Witness' Account: Good, Or Too Good To Be True?

May 10, 2000|By Eric Zorn.

PARIS, Ill. — Debra Rienbolt (the name as published has been corrected here and in subsequent references in this text) had a good story for the detectives who were investigating the horrific stabbing murders of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads:

Instead of going to her job as a certified nurse's aide on the evening before the mysterious, early-morning slayings in July 1986, she told them, she asked co-worker Bev Johnson to clock in for her and went barhopping instead. At Jeanie's Place, she said, she saw Dyke arguing with Herb Whitlock, a local lowlife whom police considered a suspect, about Dyke's effort to back out of a deal of some sort.

FOR THE RECORD - This column contains corrected material.The name of Debra Rienbolt was misspelled in the published column.

Later, Rienbolt, 30, said she and her friend Barb Furry ended up at the Tap Room. And there was Whitlock again! This time with another possible suspect, Randy Steidl, and another important character, Darrell Herrington.

Herrington was important because, in September, after the crime, he suddenly came forward to tell police he was with Steidl and Whitlock that night. In fact, he said he had traveled with them to the Rhoadses' house, heard the arguments and seen the knife, the bodies and all the blood. But he had been extremely drunk that night by his own admission and he couldn't pass a lie-detector test. Police had done little with his story.

But Rienbolt's account, volunteered in mid-February, bolstered Herrington's credibility. Better still, she said she saw Whitlock use a large knife to open an envelope at the Tap Room and heard him speak of "tak[ing] care of a few people [who] know too much" in the context of a creepy allusion to Karen.

Rienbolt said she and Furry left, drove around, popped some codeine pills, then hit the American Legion bar, another one of the numerous drinking establishments that dot this Downstate town of 9,000 just across the Indiana border from Terre Haute. Amazingly, Whitlock and Steidl were there too.

The men left just after the bar closed at midnight, she said, and she worried that they were up to no good. So she drove alone past the Rhoadses' house, a two-story rental just a few blocks from the town square. She said she saw Whitlock outside and kept driving.

A little before 5 that morning, firefighters found the house on fire and the Rhoadses slain in their bedroom. At daybreak, Rienbolt told police, a bloodied Whitlock stopped by her house and told her to keep her mouth shut. Two days later, she said, she was drinking at the Horseshoe Bar and asked Whitlock if she could borrow a knife. He gave her a blood-encrusted weapon that he told her had "been around," and she cleaned it off.

Based on Rienbolt's word, police arrested Whitlock and Steidl and a grand jury charged them in the Rhoadses' murders.

But Rienbolt's seemingly good story had problems. Co-worker Johnson wasn't at work that day to clock Rienbolt in. Furry said she wasn't with Rienbolt that night. Other witnesses put Steidl and Whitlock elsewhere.

Her murder timeline didn't match the time of the fire or other disturbances neighbors had heard. Her long history of drug and alcohol abuse and a felony theft conviction made her less than believable. And another co-worker told police that Rienbolt was carrying a big knife at least a month before the murders.

So, as if to compensate, her good story got even better when she told it a second time to police in late March: The knife was hers and Whitlock had borrowed it at the Legion bar. And she didn't just drive by the house, she said, she actually went inside, heard the screams and saw the dead bodies.

On April 11, two days before police checked Rienbolt into a residential drug-treatment program, her even-better story got great: Not only had she gone inside, she said, but she had also participated in the murders--physically restraining Karen while Whitlock and Steidl stabbed Dyke and then Karen.

One of the assailants, she said, was wielding a piece of a broken lamp.

A broken lamp had, in fact, been found at the scene! Perfect! Or too perfect?

Jurors would have to decide. Two death-penalty trials were about to begin, with Debra Rienbolt as the star witness.